New-old Carmen returns to the Opéra de Montréal
Carmen. World première. Well, not exactly. Bizet’s valedictory opera is inevitably ranked among the top five in popularity by seasonal compilers of global performance data. Frequently it occupies the top spot.
All the same, the performance of May 4 in Place des Arts will be the first by the Opéra de Montréal in 14 years — a long hiatus for any French-language house. It qualifies also as the first performance of what the company is calling a “made in Quebec” version, brought to stage by Charles Binamé, a director known for his work in television and cinema, with revised dialogue and new interludes of music, the latter crafted by the conductor Alain Trudel.
“Everything I put in is Bizet,” this native Montrealer clarified last week at an open rehearsal. “It’s about respecting the will of the composer.”
Which task has proven remarkably difficult over the decades. The version of Carmen premièred at the Opéra-Comique in Paris on March 3, 1875 was designed to conform to the theatrical protocols of the No. 2 house in town, notably by alternating musical interludes with spoken dialogue. (Mandatory footnote: despite the nomenclature, the plot of an “opéra comique” could, as in the case of Carmen, be tragic.)
The cool press reception of Carmen is well documented; its impact on contemporary musicians and cultivated listeners was more positive. Both Massenet and Saint-Saëns wrote congratulatory notes to the composer. Gounod was in a bit of a funk over what he perceived as an instance of borrowing. Tchaikovsky saw Carmen in 1876 and became its ardent champion.
What is certain is that Bizet’s death on June 3, 1875 at age 36 after an ill-advised swim in the Seine was a horrible misfortune both on its own terms and because of the state in which the musical materials were left. Whether the original published score or a shorter piano-vocal version issued during the initial run should be regarded as authoritative is only one of several problems bedevilling Carmen scholars.
In any case, the passing of the composer did not stop the progress of the opera, which was already contracted for presentation in Vienna. Bizet’s friend Ernest Guiraud wrote recitatives — speech set to melody — to replace the spoken dialogue, which was greatly reduced. Guiraud’s version (often with some dialogue restored) quickly became dominant. This New Orleans-born Frenchman also assembled the popular orchestral suites that had much to do with making the tunes of the Habanera and the Toreador Song familiar to millions.
Far from thoughtless vandalism, Guiraud’s recitatives were a necessary measure. As the British musicologist Richard Langham Smith points out: “There is little doubt that Bizet might have carried out such a task himself, had he survived, because the traditions of the Paris OpéraComique, which demanded an alternation of spoken drama and musical numbers, were not suitable for the international operatic world.”
Many listeners (including the present writer) learned Carmen through the Guiraud score and still have it seared into their skulls. Some listeners (including the present writer) think it is a jolly good piece of work.
Nevertheless, the tide started to turn against Guiraud in the musicologically correct late-middle of the 20th century. The “Opéra-Comique” version in the 1964 edition of Fritz Oeser gradually became the preferred source, despite criticism from some quarters that it restored possibly rejected music and otherwise offered too much information.
But back to Montreal, Binamé and Trudel. The conductor (known to Montrealers also as music director of the Orchestre Symphonique de Laval) intensely dislikes the Guiraud recitatives. “Nothing to do with Bizet,” Trudel says. More like Mozart. His basic resource is Oeser.
But Trudel recognizes the problems inherent in a stopand-go “Opéra-Comique” presentation, with often lengthy interludes of dialogue. Even for a French-speaking crowd, Don José’s recitation of the content of his mother’s letter — after his duet with Micaëla, the hometown girl who delivered it, is over — can seem a poor use of stage time if there is no musical support. Nor are opera singers necessarily comfortable as garden-variety thespians, speaking with no musical cues.
Add the complication of revised dialogue and the sensibilities of Binamé (who has spent months coaching the members of the all-Canadian cast on his conception of their personalities) and there arose a need for something like background music to create cinematic flow.
"Charles wanted 10 seconds here, 20 seconds there, 35 seconds there, behind the action,” is how Trudel put it. “I think because he comes from the cinema, he wants action that is continuous. So there is music under the dialogue.”
What Trudel wishes to stress is that his new music is all derived from the score. Even if its use is sometimes creative, as when Trudel introduces a “shadow” of a menacing theme from the last minutes of the opera when Don José declares to Carmen in Act 2 that he “adores” her.
“It goes in your subconscious a little bit, hopefully,” Trudel says.
An improvement on Bizet? Not at all.
“What I did is very simple,” the conductor says. “And I did it in a humble way.”
This is not the first time the most famous of all French operas has been adapted to needs and preferences of an artistic team. The British theatre director Peter Brook masterminded La tragédie de Carmen, an 80-minute distillation for four characters that was well received in 1981 (but panned in a recent disco-influenced revival in 2017).
Some will recall the headlines generated last year by the Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino in Florence, where the authorities decided to subvert (or invert) the tragic conclusion. Carmen not only survives in this production but dispatches her stalker, Don José, with a revolver.
No such revision will visit the stage of Salle Wilfrid Pelletier. “It never entered my mind that the story could end in any other way,” said OdM artistic director Michel Beaulac. “The story is about this Andalusian woman whose freedom is so essential to her life that she would rather sacrifice her life than sacrifice her freedom.
“I knew Carmen by heart before I went to school. The mere idea of changing the ending, knowing what I feel about that story — and knowing what Charles feels — I would never even think of making such a change.
“These are socio-political approaches to opera that have nothing to do with the subject. Turn things outside down? No, write a new opera! And that is what we are doing.”
The last comment was a reference to the OdM’s enterprising work in the contemporary field.
Carmen plays for five performances rather than the usual four — a testament to the popularity of the piece and the faith of the company in its new staging. Another show of support comes from Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, which has granted the OdM $100,000 in funding to film the Carmen for big-screen transmission. Details are promised “in the coming weeks.”